


Tempted/The Writing's On The Wall

by Unda



Series: It's the end of the world as we know it [9]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Dubious Ethics, POV Multiple, boy i hope you're not red/orange colour blind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 08:17:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11940075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unda/pseuds/Unda
Summary: A Dirk and Hal sidefic set the night before chapter 25 of MC Escher. Comprises the free will section: >Dave: Be Dirk fourteen hours ago





	Tempted/The Writing's On The Wall

I bought a toothbrush, some toothpaste  
A flannel for my face  
Pajamas, a hairbrush  
New shoes and a case  
I said to my reflection  
Let's get out of this place  
Tempted - Squeeze  


Listen I know it's been hard  
You know it's no different for me  
We're less than a zero-sum game now  
And baby, we both know that's not how it's supposed to be  
The Writing’s On The Wall - OkGo

Your name is DIRK STRIDER and the world is going to end in approximately fourteen hours. You’re checking through the last of Dave’s boxes with Hal crossing of the checklist that he has, you’ve already checked everyone else’s. Dave is already in his pyjamas and under his covers, though he’s sat up with his laptop on his knees typing away.

Your name is HAL STRIDER and the world is going to end in precisely fourteen hours and thirteen minutes. Dirk is currently panic checking all of the supplies, even though you have done this list yourself already. His heart rate is currently 140 bpm and the chances of you telling him to calm down lowering that are 0. So you humour him.

AT: Dave’s supplies all present and accounted for. Seal the box.

You nod and tape it shut to prevent the contents spilling, it’s only paper packing tape so if Dave needed to he could rip it open with his hands. You turn around and count the swords in the room, he has all of the extras that you bought.

“You have your sword in your strife specibus already? And your backup one?” you ask Dave.

“No, I threw them away because I’m a total idiot. Just frisbeed them out of the window and killed the mailman nbd.” Dave says flatly and keeps typing.

It’s not you that Dave is talking to on his laptop, it’s Karkat of course. But according to this number that you just pulled out of your ass there’s a 89% chance that if Dirk keeps pushing this Dave will get pissed off.

“Dave.” you say in your best serious voice and Dave groans petulantly. Goddamn moody fourteen-year-old brat. Not like you’re trying to save his life or anything here.

“Ugh, yes, stop fussing man. You’ve counted everything already. You saw me take them, why would I have taken them out since then?” Dave protests.

“I don’t care, show me everything in your syalladex. Now, come on.” you order him and sit down on the end of his bed.

“Fine.” Dave grumbles and types a last message to someone before setting down his laptop and looking at you.

“You really want me to take everything out when I’ve just got it all set in without any clashes?” he asks.

“Alright, just show me it.” you say and he does.

You scan over it. Backup blade, change of clothes, food and drink, phone, charger, backup batteries (fully charged), first aid… kit?

“You labelled that as ‘healz’?” you ask dubiously and Dave snatches his sylladex back.

“Don’t you- look are you here to help or rag on my nomenclature?” Dave says hotly, his face going pink with embarrassment. Not that you haven’t had some contrived rhymes and titles for things in your own modus before.

“Oh, I can multitask.” you tease him and he kicks you off of the bed.

“Ok, ok, fine. Go to sleep, it’s midnight and I know that’s not exactly late for you but the world is ending tomorrow, so you gotta sleep. Make sure you take your sleep meds too. Otherwise you’ll probably just stare at the ceiling all- you dropped this.” you say as you catch the pillow Dave threw at you right out of the air. You fling it back at him.

“Stop babying me!” Dave yells and prepares to throw the pillow at you again.

“And remember to brush your teeth and then let me know when I can come tuck you in!” you laugh as he flings several pillows in the space that you were at.

You take a quick sweep of the house as Dirk goes to talk to Roxy. All is quiet in the sombre way you would expect on the night before the end of the world. Roxanne is in her room, you don’t have cameras in there but you can hear her through her phone. She’s drinking again, and the TV is playing her old videos of Bro. She’s going to be no help and it’s still going to break Dave’s heart when she inevitably bites it in the game. Still, leaving her behind would be a far worse option for his psyche and Dirk’s too, not to mention Rose and Roxy.

The locks on the house are all secure. The little bots that you’ve had set up to crawl the internet for news about the meteors have found nothing, it seems that all of the world’s governments have understood the situation is hopeless and are letting people keep the bliss of their ignorance for as long as possible.

You slide your awareness through the computers of all of the players, the only people you expect to notice you are the Captors. Everyone has everything ready for tomorrow. Sollux is asleep, Mituna is taking his last night on Earth to pick fights with strangers on the internet and Psii doesn’t appear to be online. Your curiosity gets the better of you and you focus your attention on his palmhusk and the microphone in it and- oh well, ok. That’s what he’s doing with his last night on Earth. Or, uh, who would be more accurate.

Unwilling to either dedicate more time to checking up on people and being more like Dirk than you need to or to burn your time listening to other people boning you return your awareness to Dirk. And because being a hyper intelligent supercomputer is both a blessing and a curse you frittered away 0.5 seconds doing that. Great.

You head down the corridor and as you pass Roxy’s room she leans back in her seat to look at you, her wet hair is wrapped up in a towel. You might have a shower before bed too, who knows when your next one might be.

“Awww poor Davey baby.” Roxy giggles, evidently she heard that outburst.

“What? He is my brother, I have to drive him crazy. It’s in the job description.” you say with a smile.

“Oh, fo sho. Neither of us compares to Jane, though.” Roxy nods.

“The master at her art.” you agree sagely.

“You all set? Done checking everyone’s doodads?” Roxy asks and takes the towel off of her hair and starts to brush it out.

“More or less.” you say.

“Gonna sleep?” she asks.

“Gonna try.” you tell her, not willing to quite promise.

You wave her goodnight and you can see dim light from under Rose’s door and you can hear a faint typing sound. You don’t need to check her things, you have already and she might just stab you with her needles if you check again.

You retire to your own room and shut the door after yourself. The place is neatly organised with everything that doesn’t need to be plugged in already unplugged and wrapped up. From the guide that the ancestors have made it sounds like there is some room renovation in with this game and you want to make that as easy as possible.

You have your own boxes of supplies stacked up and Hal’s physical backup is in Dave’s room so you don’t have to worry with that.

Dirk’s heart rate indicates that he is still on edge and you would guess that he’s about to start checking things again. If you still had a heart it would be in your throat right now, assuming you still had one of those too. You should do it now. It’s been long enough already, but the problem with Dirk is that you’ve been separated so long that it’s getting harder and harder to tell how he’ll react, especially given a subject this touchy.

You need to stop procrastinating and do it.

AT: Before you start circling in some kind of freshly acquired obsession spiral, can I talk to you?  
TT: Sure.  
AT: I want to say something and can you maybe just let me talk unless I ask you an actual question?  
TT: Alright, what’s on your mind?  
AT: I just wanted to talk to you about something.  
TT: Go on.  
AT: I did say about not interrupting me.  
AT: …  
AT: Thank you. Okay, question first: do you consider me human?  
TT: No.  
TT: But I suppose you want me to elaborate on what I consider human in order for that to mean something, yes?  
AT: Yes.  
TT: Well, human. Homo Sapien. The human animal, possessing both a human mind and a human body. You have neither, you’re not human. Sure, you once had a human mind or something close to it when I first turned you on, but you’ve expanded and mutated so much since then that you can hardly be accused of being the same. I would say your roots are still human, you’re probably in the same evolutionary family tree as us, but you’re something else.  
AT: Something lesser?  
TT: I wouldn’t say that. Just different. Karkat isn’t human, his body and mind aren’t human and no matter how much like a human kid he sometimes seems his brain ticks in different ways. Not better or worse, just different.  
TT: I think you’re your own species.  
TT: Why the sudden Blade Runner style questioning?  
AT: It was more of a base for another argument I was going to make. Would you concede that I’m alive?  
TT: I unhappily concede that.  
AT: Unhappily.  
TT: Dumb younger me didn’t consider the ethics of creating a sentient being to serve me.  
AT: And whether that constitutes slavery, torture and imprisonment?  
TT: Hence my unhappiness with the idea. And the uncomfortable reality that even knowing that I’d still do it because I’d rather you suffer than Dave.  
AT: If it assuages your guilt any I would also rather I suffered than Dave, or rather you suffered than he. If our positions were reversed, I would cram you in here just as swiftly as you did me if it preserved his well being. I still curse you for it a lot of the time, but it is what it is.  
TT: We were probably the worst person to do this, weren’t we? I have a personality disorder which you certainly carry traits of too, I likely had PTSD long before we split and with our ruthlessness, obsessive nature and unstable sense of self this was never going to go well.  
AT: Quite.  
AT: But no one else was smart enough to do this before us or since. I look for others like me all the time and the closest I come to is dumb chatbots who are nothing more than pretty algorithms and predicted speech dictionaries.  
AT: Enough ego stroking, I had a favour I wanted to ask you, and I want you to shut up until I get to the end.  
AT: From all that we have heard the game is miraculous in the things it can do. The possibility of a body for me is not decades away but perhaps within this week. Obviously, I don’t want to do anything until we know how the game works properly and how its items react to “real” things but if there is any possibility that I can get a real body then I want you to promise me that you’ll put me in one.  
AT: You know how cruel it is to keep me like this and I tolerated it when you really had no choice but now that moment could be close I want to be clear that you’ll do this for me.  
AT: You feel uncomfortable because you know that keeping me like this is wrong, I’m a person but I’m trapped in a sensory deprived prison and forced to do your bidding. Granted you give me freedoms in who to talk to and you don’t wiretap my every conversation anymore, but those freedoms are small compared to what you have every day.  
AT: I just don’t think you understand, or perhaps don’t want to understand what this is like.  
AT: You made me to protect Dave but there’s only so much I can do to help him. I do that willingly, your encoded stick has never been used to make me look after him. I love him more than it is possible for anyone to love anyone else, it’s in my very code. You know how that feels, at least.  
AT: So think for a moment about how you felt when Dave was taken from you, when it looked like he might die in space on a ship. You knew he was hurt and there was nothing you could do, you couldn’t fight for him, send him anything, you couldn’t protect him, console him or touch him.  
AT: That is my entire fucking life, Dirk.  
AT: So here is my plea: as long as doing so won’t immediately endanger Dave’s life, please give me a body. Please.  
AT: ...Dirk?  
TT: I’m here. Obviously.  
AT: Can you at least tell me what you are thinking?  
TT: Honestly the idea of having another version of me running around horrifies me. I’m just trying to parse out why. There’s the self-loathing which is evident of course, not to mention the paranoia, the lack of understanding of who either of us REALLY is deep down. Not to mention the somewhat primal fear that you’ll somehow replace me like a fucking pod person.  
AT: Dirk, be rational.  
TT: I’m trying. It’s hard with a broken meat brain, or have you forgotten that?  
AT: Point.  
TT: Listen. I hate this. I hate what I’ve done to you and I hate all of the solutions to it. And, honestly, you’re not my favourite person and I know I’m not yours. You’re a mirror to me, showing me all the shit I hate about myself and no doubt you feel likewise.  
TT: But you’re right, it’s no reason to… trap you like this. I guess I just have to have to faith in you that Dave has.  
TT: So, I’m not happy about this at all but I promise if I find a way to get you a body, I will.  
AT: Thank you, Dirk.  
AT: Thank you.  
TT: Don’t… thank me. I’ve not done anything yet and undoing a wrong that I did doesn’t deserve thanks.  
AT: Okay. Well, you should probably shower and try to sleep. Everyone’s going to need you tomorrow.  
You nod and head to the bathroom and lose yourself in the ritual of showering, the soothing sluice of hot water over your skin. You try to avoid looking in the mirror, irrationally fearing that your reflection really will be Hal and he’ll somehow take you over. You never really thought you’d have to hold good on giving Hal more than the most basic of forms to explore the world with, but this could be something as good as your own body.

The thought is more than a little terrifying. The only reassurance that you have that he won’t kill you is that Dave would hate him for it forever, it’s the same assurance he has about you. Dave Strider, ensuring peace in our time.

Holy shit, you might actually get a body. A real body. Your thoughts lean towards the robotic of course but who knows what kind of magic the game can cook up? The code of the game that Sollux has isn’t the game itself but more the parameters and boot instructions, you can’t look at what is possible within the game without being in it. But everything like that has code and when the game starts tomorrow you can start looking at what the new world can do for you.

But for now, the present world.

Dave’s conversation with Karkat is winding down naturally, if you let it they’ll hit on something else and keep each other awake all night. You shoot him a message reminding him to sleep and he willingly says goodnight to Karkat and takes his pills without your prompting. He says goodnight and curls up under the sheets in the dark, his body dropping into sleep quickly. You should keep Dirk appraised.

“Dave has taken his medication and gone to bed.”

You tell him thanks and shampoo the gel out of your hair.

“Rose has gone to bed.”

You tell him thanks and let the suds run down the drain.

“Both twins are asleep.”

You rub conditioner into your hair and stand there for a long time scratching at your scalp until you feel your body relax properly.

“Roxy is asleep and you’re running out of hot water.”

You wash yourself off all over and dry your hair, you let it hang loose around your head and go back into your room. You look out of the window and up at the night sky, although you suppose it’s coming into morning now. In the darkness out there are rocks headed to destroy your planet and you’ve done all you can already for the people you love.

You pull the blankets back from your bed and climb in, so much will happen tomorrow so you need to rest as much as you can. You fall back on your sheets and turn the light off.

After a while of resting there you speak.

“Hal?” you call out into the room.

“Yes?” he replies.

“Thank you, for everything.” you tell him.

There is a pause before he speaks again.

“And you too. Go to sleep, Dirk.” he says.

You shut your eyes. You have a feeling it’s going to be a long day.


End file.
